Looks like a study in contrasts - the Power7 designers continuing to go after the highest speed - 5+ GHz, 80MB caches, the AppliedMicro designers going after integration, efficiency and right sizing and Intel doing what it does best - leading edge fabs that give it the advantage. It appears that all three are targeting different segments of the server market.
Oh and Pat comes across as a petty partisan. Maybe he should run for political office.

Good to see that Oracle is continuing the Sparc line though there were fears of it's imminent demise. Sparc lost the battle for supremacy a decade back which made it easy for X86 to proliferate but these new chips could bring about some refreshing change in server market. How low can they make a server to own while still providing the reliability and throughput is the question.

The Core is a tiny portion of any Server, so "which core ?" is asking the wrong question.
More important are GB/s/watt numbers, and longevity and process.
Servers is a simple numbers game, there is no marketing sizzle, or packaging design froth.
That means the big players, with strong FAB backup, will continue to be the main forces here.
It is also why highly focused solutions, like IBMs, can find a place.